Hovey's Handbook of the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky: A Practical Guide to the Regulation Routes — John Shaqi
Hovey's Handbook of the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky: A Practical Guide to the Regulation RoutesHovey, Horace Carver
History
Hovey's Handbook of the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky: A Practical Guide to the Regulation Routes
Hovey, Horace Carver
Mammoth Cave (Ky.)
Darnall’s Way was cut through the sandbank, in 1896, to the summit,
where a bridge cast directly across the abyss gives us the most complete
view to be had of the locality. One remarkable feature is a folded
alabaster curtain one hundred and nineteen feet high. By casting
fire-balls down the whole interior is grandly illuminated. Davidson
descended to the bottom, as others have occasionally done since, by
means of a well some thirty feet deep, down which one clambers like a
chimney-sweep. He found there “stretching away in midnight blackness a
horrid pool of water.” In 1863 Mr. F. J. Stevenson, of London, had a
boat made and lowered through the window, on which he floated away for
seven long hours on a perilous voyage that no man has since then
repeated. The water now setting back from Green River has closed the
entrance to what we term “Stevenson’s Lost River”; but his old boat
still lies where it was stranded at the bottom of Gorin’s Dome.
Another huge abyss, the Bottomless Pit, was long regarded as ending
further progress, till Stephen Bishop crossed it in 1840 by means of a
slender cedar sapling thrown over the yawning gulf; since when it has
been spanned by a substantial and safe bridge. Instead of being
“bottomless” it is exactly one hundred and five feet deep. Above it is
Shelby’s Dome, named for the first Governor of Kentucky. Balls of cotton
waste saturated with coal-oil are flung down by the guides, which
grandly display the wrinkled and corrugated walls of the pit. Looking
directly across, we see an opening through which the writer and William
Garvin emerged from their explorations around Scylla and Charybdis.
There are other ways of approach, one from Gorin’s Dome, another from
near the Scotchman’s Trap, and still another from River Hall to the very
bottom, from which the upward view almost equals that from the base of
Gorin’s Dome. All this great group of pits is connected below to form an
immense hall, about four hundred feet long, which at high water is
flooded by the overflow from River Hall. By Special permission, of
former President of the United States Benjamin Harrison, this vast room
was named Harrison Hall.
[Illustration: “Bottomless Pit”]
On crossing the Bridge of Sighs we find an enlargement of the Cave
formerly used as a dining place, and hence known as Reveller’s Hall.
Pensico Avenue, along which we go, is crossed underneath by an invisible
passageway, causing sounds to be reproduced in Echo Chamber with
marvelous reverberations. Wending our way amid the huge rocks that
encumber Wild Hall we next reach the Grand Crossing, and beyond it the
singular dry stalactite, the Pineapple Bush, and end our path in
Angelica’s Grotto, with its curious Hanging Grove.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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